Where Fish Fall From the Sky

Illustration by Brooks SalzwedelEverythings a metaphor, the urbane, transgendered Oshima tells the titular Kafka in the ambitious, meditative Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakamis latest novel. Everything is, in worlds of Murakamis making  his novels are rife with extended metaphors, expressed through kinetic, surreal stories, and populated with wildly eccentric characters: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World explored the limits of the mind, using as analogues the dualities of man and shadow, dreams and reality; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ­propelled its archetypal Murakamian Everyman into the underworlds of Tokyo as he navigated the sinister underside of human nature; and A Wild Sheep Chases hero stumbled onto existential truths via, well, a wild sheep chase. Kafka on the Shore is, then, an examination of memory and fate. Paralleling the journeys of two vastly disparate characters, the story unfolds with 15-year-old Kafka Tamura running away from home on a twofold, contradictory quest: to escape an oedipal curse yet, ironically, also to seek out the mother who abandoned him years ago. Told in alternating chapters are the travels of mentally impaired, 60-year-old Nakata, which begin with the old mans search for missing neighborhood cats. Nakata is perhaps Murakamis most heartbreakingly pathetic creation  as a bright 9-year-old student, he suffered a mysterious accident on a school excursion and lost not only his memories, but also his capacity for understanding the concept of memory  or indeed any abstract idea at all (The only thing I understand is the present, he says). Nakata is made even more tragic by the fact that he is blithely incognizant of his own shortchanged existence  content by his own standards, but pitiable by ours. Driven by fate, Kafka and Nakata hurtle toward a common destination, along the way encountering the authors usual spate of peculiar personalities  this is Murakami, after all  ranging from the ethereal (middle-aged Miss Saeki, haunted by a love lost) to the offbeat (hermaphroditic hemophiliac Oshima, who takes Kafka under his/her wing) to the truly bizarre (a cat-killer calling himself Johnnie Walker and an omniscient pimp dressed as Colonel Sanders). The boundaries of time and memory dissolve when Kafka comes face to face with Miss Saekis past and is drawn into that bygone world, and ultimately must choose between remaining in the present or existing in a kind of living memory. As such, Kafka on the Shore defies time and linearity  fragments of the past run concurrently with the present  which in less imaginative hands could be hopelessly confusing. But Murakami revels in playing with convention; he embraces the fantastical and treats it with utter gravity, resulting in a hyperreality whereby anything can happen. Kafka and Nakata never physically meet  their simultaneous odysseys operate on separate planes, but as both are inextricably linked to the memories and destinies of the other, their paths metaphysically converge at a single but crucial juncture: The actions of one allow for the dreams of the other to come to life. The absurdities in Kafka, in their stark contrast to the characters central human elements, distill and draw out the emotion and pathos. Time blurs, identities are fractured and reconstructed, cats talk, fish fall from the sky  and what survives is the metaphor. KAFKA ON THE SHORE | By HARUKI MURAKAMI | Knopf | 448 pages | $26, hardcover

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